Marchlands (ITV1) is a house – a big old house, somewhere in West Yorkshire. It's also a house with a past, although for our purposes that past only goes back to the 1960s, when – as the music makes clear – Something Bad happened.

Marchlands opened with a girl running through the woods in slow motion, so it seemed likely the Something Bad happened to her, but there's a lot going on in the house. The action takes place in three periods (1968, 1987 and 2010) with three sets of residents – the Bowens, the Maynards and the irritating couple who have just bought it, Mark and Nisha. At the start we swapped eras so often, it was hard to keep track, so one was grateful for period details: in 1968 people smoke; in 1987 they watch Crossroads; in 2010 they are irritating.

If the time-shifting was confusing, I still always felt one step ahead of the plot. Back in 1968 little Alice Bowen drowns; her mother can't come to terms with the loss. In 1987, little Amy Maynard has an imaginary friend called Alice, who is invisible to everyone else, according to Amy, "because she's dead". In 2010, Nisha discovers a photograph of dead Alice behind the skirting board.

So Alice is haunting the house. Or is she? Is this the sort of ghost story where rational and/or psychological explanations are continually offered for any weird phenomena because, you know, there's no such thing as ghosts? So far there isn't that much in the way of phenomena: there's something weird going on with the taps in 1987, and a kitten turns up dead in a pond; in 2010 Nisha falls off a ladder, but that was just a loose floorboard.

Much more compelling is the mystery surrounding the characters. Scott Maynard, the boy from 1987, works in the corner shop in 2010. Mark, the irritating guy from 2010, grew up with Scott in 1987, so he knows whatever there is to know about Marchlands. Why did he buy it? More to the point, how could he afford it? It's huge. Did he go back in time to buy it at 1987 prices? There are five more episodes to go – no doubt all will be revealed.

Louis Theroux, your TV guide to society's colourful fringes, last night took a tour of the West Bank, the white-hot centre of global human irrationality. In Louis Theroux: Ultra Zionists (BBC2) he met Daniel, a hardline nationalist Israeli from Australia whose special gift, it seems, is remaining oblivious to things that do not underpin his worldview. He works for an organisation that houses Jews in the overwhelmingly Palestinian East Jerusalem, Israel's annexation of which is recognised by no other country. "So what for the world?" said Daniel. "It doesn't bother me." Theroux accused him of talking as if the land meant nothing to Arabs. "Well, it doesn't," said Daniel. "This is the Jewish homeland, and there's never been a Palestinian people. If they want to express themselves nationally, they can express themselves somewhere else."

Daniel believes the enmity between Jews and Arabs is biblically decreed, which probably explains why he thinks it's OK to say things like that. It makes him, if nothing else, a pretty unpleasant neighbour. If you stripped away his religious extremism and blinkered nationalism, he would still be a jerk.

Theroux wisely resisted any attempt to make sense of what is known in online circles as the I/P question. Instead he concentrated on individuals, and why they chose to live in an atmosphere "somewhere between embattled and entitled". In a way it was all about being bad neighbours – almost everyone he interviewed had long since divested themselves of any responsibility for what happens to those on the other side. The young man who lived in an illegal West Bank encampment – illegal in Israel, even – had a vision of a greater Israel that did not stretch to thinking about where the Palestinians, whose land it would include, might go.

The weirdest encounter was with a group of American Christians who had volunteered to pick grapes at a West Bank vineyard. "It's a labour of love for the nation of Israel," said one. Like Daniel, they seemed incapable of viewing the situation as in any way complex. In general, when Theroux goes on one of his adventures one is forced to admire his daft, naive courage. In this case I was left admiring his patience.